Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

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  • rdudejr@gmail.com

    Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

    Hi all,

    I hardly ever make a post unless I am having a very purplexing issue,
    so this one should be good...

    I am trying to do a load against a database on an AIX server into a
    DB2 v9.1 database, using SAN for storage. The table has a few CLOBs
    (smallish clobs but we are storing XML data in non-native format).
    Here is the load command I am using:

    db2 "load from loadset1 of del modified by chardel| coldel& insert
    into testschema.test table nonrecoverable data buffer 240000
    disk_parallelis m 32"

    Now I am loading about 440 rows/second, which to me is abysmally
    slow. The tablespaces I am loading into have 8 containers and I
    believe there are at least 30 disks on the SAN that the data
    eventually lives on. So needless to say there should be all the I/O
    power available to load this data.

    My data file I am loading from lives on the same filesystem (and
    therefore same logical volume), so I am aware that IO headseek issues
    could be the problem. However, the way I understand SAN is that all
    the disks are working together, so SAN takes care of the data
    allocation so that headseek does not become a problem.

    I guess what I am asking is a twofold question...firs t (and the most
    appropriate for this forum), is my load command most appopriate for
    what I am trying to do?

    Second, does the output of topas below indicate that the disks are
    really only working at 20% on average? Or is it a lie since I am
    running on SAN? Anyone with simular experience please help!

    If what is below is indeed correct, why is the load not using all the
    disk and/or CPU?


    Topas Monitor for host: server1 EVENTS/QUEUES FILE/TTY
    Mon Nov 10 16:09:09 2008 Interval: 2 Cswitch 8071
    Readch 1520.1K
    Syscall 5308
    Writech 1976.3K
    CPU User% Kern% Wait% Idle% Reads 168
    Rawin 0
    cpu1 69.5 6.5 0.0 24.0 Writes 889
    Ttyout 624
    cpu2 1.0 4.0 7.5 87.5 Forks 0
    Igets 0
    cpu4 0.5 4.0 21.5 74.0 Execs 1
    Namei 24
    cpu0 0.5 3.0 0.0 96.5 Runqueue 1.0
    Dirblk 0
    cpu5 0.0 3.0 25.5 71.5 Waitqueue 0.0
    cpu3 0.0 2.0 15.5 82.5
    cpu6 0.0 2.0 15.0 83.0
    PAGING MEMORY
    cpu7 0.0 5.5 12.5 82.0
    Faults 1032 Real,MB 24576

    Steals 390 % Comp 39.9
    Network KBPS I-Pack O-Pack KB-In KB-Out PgspIn 0 %
    Noncomp 13.3
    en6 0.8 1.0 1.5 0.1 0.7 PgspOut 0 %
    Client 2.2
    en5 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 PageIn 1267
    lo0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 PageOut 888
    PAGING SPACE
    Sios 2155
    Size,MB 12032
    Disk Busy% KBPS TPS KB-Read KB-Writ %
    Used 0.0
    hdisk17 18.0 944.0 236.0 518.0 426.0 NFS (calls/sec) %
    Free 100.0
    hdisk27 14.5 1.0K 237.0 456.0 584.0 ServerV2 0
    hdisk42 14.0 780.0 195.0 384.0 396.0 ClientV2 0
    Press:
    hdisk22 13.5 876.0 219.0 424.0 452.0 ServerV3 0 "h"
    for help
    hdisk12 12.0 892.0 211.5 414.0 478.0 ClientV3 0 "q"
    to quit
    hdisk37 11.0 900.0 214.0 392.0 508.0
    hdisk7 11.0 950.0 237.5 480.0 470.0
    hdisk32 6.0 874.0 218.5 464.0 410.0
    hdisk29 2.0 512.0 2.0 512.0 0.0
    hdisk24 2.0 512.0 2.0 512.0 0.0
    hdisk9 1.5 256.0 1.0 256.0 0.0
    hdisk19 1.0 256.0 1.0 256.0 0.0
    hdisk16 0.5 6.0 1.5 0.0 6.0
    hdisk15 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
    hdisk14 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
    hdisk11 0.0 2.0 0.5 0.0 2.0
    hdisk1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
    hdisk20 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

    Name PID CPU% PgSp Owner
    db2sysc 1839138 10.7 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 574364 0.1 0.5 tvpi01
    db2sysc 1188050 0.1 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 663620 0.1 0.7 tvpi01
    db2sysc 1225124 0.1 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 290888 0.1 0.7 tvpi01
    db2sysc 1552616 0.1 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 671780 0.1 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 1339656 0.1 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 1511780 0.1 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 1323334 0.1 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 1679524 0.1 0.6 tvpi01
    topas 1564806 0.1 3.5 tvpi01
    db2sysc 983414 0.1 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 143704 0.1 0.7 tvpi01
    db2sysc 1216702 0.1 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 975286 0.0 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 872862 0.0 0.7 tvpi01
    db2sysc 962762 0.0 0.6 tvpi01
    db2sysc 1180054 0.0 0.6 tvpi01







  • rdudejr@gmail.com

    #2
    Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

    After making my post I realize how difficult the topas output is to
    read so let me post the highlights:

    8 CPUs, 1 working at 65%, the all hovering near 1%, wait% from 5-25%.

    20+disks, 10 at 10-20% busy, each reading and writing at around 500kb/
    s, the rest hardly doing any work at all.

    Memory 24GB, 55% free, 0% pageing space used
    page in/out 1267/888 respectively.

    Hope that helps!

    Comment

    • Ian

      #3
      Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

      rdudejr@gmail.c om wrote:
      Hi all,
      >
      I hardly ever make a post unless I am having a very purplexing issue,
      so this one should be good...
      >
      I am trying to do a load against a database on an AIX server into a
      DB2 v9.1 database, using SAN for storage. The table has a few CLOBs
      (smallish clobs but we are storing XML data in non-native format).
      Here is the load command I am using:
      >
      db2 "load from loadset1 of del modified by chardel| coldel& insert
      into testschema.test table nonrecoverable data buffer 240000
      disk_parallelis m 32"
      >
      Now I am loading about 440 rows/second, which to me is abysmally
      slow. The tablespaces I am loading into have 8 containers and I
      believe there are at least 30 disks on the SAN that the data
      eventually lives on. So needless to say there should be all the I/O
      power available to load this data.
      Can you post any more information, such as table DDL, tablespace
      definition, maybe a few sample rows, etc?

      Have you tried the load letting DB2 choose its own defaults for
      data buffer / disk_parallelis m settings?



      Comment

      • rdudejr

        #4
        Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

        On Nov 10, 6:16 pm, Ian <ianb...@mobile audio.comwrote:
        rdud...@gmail.c om wrote:
        Hi all,
        >
        I hardly ever make a post unless I am having a very purplexing issue,
        so this one should be good...
        >
        I am trying to do a load against a database on an AIX server into a
        DB2 v9.1 database, using SAN for storage.  The table has a few CLOBs
        (smallish clobs but we are storing XML data in non-native format).
        Here is the load command I am using:
        >
        db2 "load from loadset1 of del modified by chardel| coldel& insert
        into testschema.test table nonrecoverable data buffer 240000
        disk_parallelis m 32"
        >
        Now I am loading about 440 rows/second, which to me is abysmally
        slow.  The tablespaces I am loading into have 8 containers and I
        believe there are at least 30 disks on the SAN that the data
        eventually lives on.  So needless to say there should be all the I/O
        power available to load this data.
        >
        Can you post any more information, such as table DDL, tablespace
        definition, maybe a few sample rows, etc?
        >
        Have you tried the load letting DB2 choose its own defaults for
        data buffer / disk_parallelis m settings?- Hide quoted text -
        >
        - Show quoted text -
        I have tried to allow the database to choose its own load values. I
        experience simular performance.

        I cant post exact DDL/sample rows for security reasons, but I will do
        my best to describe:

        The table itself is a parent table to other child tables ( but this
        should not matter with a load). It has about 25 columns, all of which
        are varchar, bigint, char, or date, except for 2, which are CLOB
        (around 3000 characters/clob).

        It is linked to 3 tablespaces, one for LOBs (32k pagesize), one for
        indexes (4k pagesize), one for normal data (4k pagesize). All 3
        tablespaces have 8 containers and live on the same filesystem which is
        mounted on a VG that is tied to a SAN with 30+ disk (probably around
        100 disk, but I dont know exactly as I am not the SAN adm).

        Is that enough info to help?

        Also a new discovery! After loading 15mil records to this table, I
        did a few table scans and got the disk usage in topas to report up to
        80% busy, so it seems that the load really is not using the full
        capacity of the disk (as the load is using about 15% of the disk).
        Also, the tablescan uses all 8 CPUs uniformially, where the load is
        only using 1 or 2 CPUs.

        Comment

        • Patrick Finnegan

          #5
          Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

          On Nov 11, 12:07 am, rdudejr <rdud...@gmail. comwrote:
          On Nov 10, 6:16 pm, Ian <ianb...@mobile audio.comwrote:
          >
          >
          >
          rdud...@gmail.c om wrote:
          Hi all,
          >
          I hardly ever make a post unless I am having a very purplexing issue,
          so this one should be good...
          >
          I am trying to do a load against a database on an AIX server into a
          DB2 v9.1 database, using SAN for storage.  The table has a few CLOBs
          (smallish clobs but we are storing XML data in non-native format).
          Here is the load command I am using:
          >
          db2 "load from loadset1 of del modified by chardel| coldel& insert
          into testschema.test table nonrecoverable data buffer 240000
          disk_parallelis m 32"
          >
          Now I am loading about 440 rows/second, which to me is abysmally
          slow.  The tablespaces I am loading into have 8 containers and I
          believe there are at least 30 disks on the SAN that the data
          eventually lives on.  So needless to say there should be all the I/O
          power available to load this data.
          >
          Can you post any more information, such as table DDL, tablespace
          definition, maybe a few sample rows, etc?
          >
          Have you tried the load letting DB2 choose its own defaults for
          data buffer / disk_parallelis m settings?- Hide quoted text -
          >
          - Show quoted text -
          >
          I have tried to allow the database to choose its own load values.  I
          experience simular performance.
          >
          I cant post exact DDL/sample rows for security reasons, but I will do
          my best to describe:
          >
          The table itself is a parent table to other child tables ( but this
          should not matter with a load).  It has about 25 columns, all of which
          are varchar, bigint, char, or date, except for 2, which are CLOB
          (around 3000 characters/clob).
          >
          It is linked to 3 tablespaces, one for LOBs (32k pagesize), one for
          indexes (4k pagesize), one for normal data (4k pagesize).  All 3
          tablespaces have 8 containers and live on the same filesystem which is
          mounted on a VG that is tied to a SAN with 30+ disk (probably around
          100 disk, but I dont know exactly as I am not the SAN adm).
          >
          Is that enough info to help?
          >
          Also a new discovery!  After loading 15mil records to this table, I
          did a few table scans and got the disk usage in topas to report up to
          80% busy, so it seems that the load really is not using the full
          capacity of the disk (as the load is using about 15% of the disk).
          Also, the tablescan uses all 8 CPUs uniformially, where the load is
          only using 1 or 2 CPUs.
          Get the DB2 write i/o speeds for transaction log data and application
          data from the database snapshot and work out the number of writes per
          millisecond.

          E.G.

          Log write time (sec.ns) = 1730.000000004
          Number write log IOs = 1035798

          (1730.000000004 * 1000) / 1035798 = 1.67 milliseconds per write.

          Direct writes = 40354784
          Direct write elapsed time (ms) = 959854

          959854 / 40354784 = 0.024 milliseconds per write.

          Ask the storage admins for the i/o stats from the san and compare.

          Where are the DB2 transaction logs located and how big are they?

          Comment

          • Patrick Finnegan

            #6
            Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

            On Nov 11, 8:15 am, Patrick Finnegan <finnegan.patr. ..@gmail.com>
            wrote:
            On Nov 11, 12:07 am, rdudejr <rdud...@gmail. comwrote:
            >
            >
            >
            On Nov 10, 6:16 pm, Ian <ianb...@mobile audio.comwrote:
            >
            rdud...@gmail.c om wrote:
            Hi all,
            >
            I hardly ever make a post unless I am having a very purplexing issue,
            so this one should be good...
            >
            I am trying to do a load against a database on an AIX server into a
            DB2 v9.1 database, using SAN for storage.  The table has a few CLOBs
            (smallish clobs but we are storing XML data in non-native format).
            Here is the load command I am using:
            >
            db2 "load from loadset1 of del modified by chardel| coldel& insert
            into testschema.test table nonrecoverable data buffer 240000
            disk_parallelis m 32"
            >
            Now I am loading about 440 rows/second, which to me is abysmally
            slow.  The tablespaces I am loading into have 8 containers and I
            believe there are at least 30 disks on the SAN that the data
            eventually lives on.  So needless to say there should be all the I/O
            power available to load this data.
            >
            Can you post any more information, such as table DDL, tablespace
            definition, maybe a few sample rows, etc?
            >
            Have you tried the load letting DB2 choose its own defaults for
            data buffer / disk_parallelis m settings?- Hide quoted text -
            >
            - Show quoted text -
            >
            I have tried to allow the database to choose its own load values.  I
            experience simular performance.
            >
            I cant post exact DDL/sample rows for security reasons, but I will do
            my best to describe:
            >
            The table itself is a parent table to other child tables ( but this
            should not matter with a load).  It has about 25 columns, all of which
            are varchar, bigint, char, or date, except for 2, which are CLOB
            (around 3000 characters/clob).
            >
            It is linked to 3 tablespaces, one for LOBs (32k pagesize), one for
            indexes (4k pagesize), one for normal data (4k pagesize).  All 3
            tablespaces have 8 containers and live on the same filesystem which is
            mounted on a VG that is tied to a SAN with 30+ disk (probably around
            100 disk, but I dont know exactly as I am not the SAN adm).
            >
            Is that enough info to help?
            >
            Also a new discovery!  After loading 15mil records to this table, I
            did a few table scans and got the disk usage in topas to report up to
            80% busy, so it seems that the load really is not using the full
            capacity of the disk (as the load is using about 15% of the disk).
            Also, the tablescan uses all 8 CPUs uniformially, where the load is
            only using 1 or 2 CPUs.
            >
            Get the DB2 write i/o speeds for transaction log data and application
            data from the database snapshot and work out the number of writes per
            millisecond.
            >
            E.G.
            >
            Log write time (sec.ns)         = 1730.000000004
            Number write log IOs                 = 1035798
            >
            (1730.000000004 * 1000) / 1035798       = 1.67 milliseconds per write.
            >
            Direct writes                             =40354784
            Direct write elapsed time (ms)    = 959854
            >
            959854 / 40354784                              = 0.024 milliseconds per write.
            >
            Ask the storage admins for the i/o stats from the san and compare.
            >
            Where are the DB2 transaction logs located and how big are they?
            If the SAN is EMC raid 5 and the write times are slow set the
            following registry variables at the instance level.

            DB2_PARALLEL_IO *

            Set the following instance parameters.

            Enable intra-partition parallelism INTRA_PARALLEL ON
            Maximum query degree of parallelism MAX_QUERYDEGREE ANY

            Set the following database parameters.

            Default query optimization class DFT_QUERYOPT 5
            Degree of parallelism DFT_DEGREE ANY

            Switch on concurrent i/o at tablespace level for all tablespaces in
            the database.

            db2 ALTER TABLESPACE USERSPACE1 NO FILE SYSTEM CACHING

            And if the load is still slow get the details for the san config.

            E.G.

            SAN is DMX-3.
            RAID is RAID 5(3+1).
            Data Block size is 256KB
            Parity Block size is 256
            Logical stripe(block) size is 768KB(256*3)

            Recreate the tablspaces as DMS using a page size larger than 4k and
            make the extent size the same as the san stripe size.

            Something like this.

            create regular tablespace xxxx
            PAGESIZE 16K
            MANAGED BY DATABASE
            USING (FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_01' 2 G,
            FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_02' 2 G,
            FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_03' 2 G,
            FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_04' 2 G)
            BUFFERPOOL yyyy
            EXTENTSIZE 768
            PREFETCHSIZE 192
            OVERHEAD 8.6
            TRANSFERRATE 0.2
            NO FILE SYSTEM CACHING;







            Comment

            • rdudejr

              #7
              Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

              On Nov 11, 4:48 am, Patrick Finnegan <finnegan.patr. ..@gmail.com>
              wrote:
              On Nov 11, 8:15 am, Patrick Finnegan <finnegan.patr. ..@gmail.com>
              wrote:
              >
              >
              >
              >
              >
              On Nov 11, 12:07 am, rdudejr <rdud...@gmail. comwrote:
              >
              On Nov 10, 6:16 pm, Ian <ianb...@mobile audio.comwrote:
              >
              rdud...@gmail.c om wrote:
              Hi all,
              >
              I hardly ever make a post unless I am having a very purplexing issue,
              so this one should be good...
              >
              I am trying to do a load against a database on an AIX server intoa
              DB2 v9.1 database, using SAN for storage.  The table has a few CLOBs
              (smallish clobs but we are storing XML data in non-native format)..
              Here is the load command I am using:
              >
              db2 "load from loadset1 of del modified by chardel| coldel& insert
              into testschema.test table nonrecoverable data buffer 240000
              disk_parallelis m 32"
              >
              Now I am loading about 440 rows/second, which to me is abysmally
              slow.  The tablespaces I am loading into have 8 containers and I
              believe there are at least 30 disks on the SAN that the data
              eventually lives on.  So needless to say there should be all the I/O
              power available to load this data.
              >
              Can you post any more information, such as table DDL, tablespace
              definition, maybe a few sample rows, etc?
              >
              Have you tried the load letting DB2 choose its own defaults for
              data buffer / disk_parallelis m settings?- Hide quoted text -
              >
              - Show quoted text -
              >
              I have tried to allow the database to choose its own load values.  I
              experience simular performance.
              >
              I cant post exact DDL/sample rows for security reasons, but I will do
              my best to describe:
              >
              The table itself is a parent table to other child tables ( but this
              should not matter with a load).  It has about 25 columns, all of which
              are varchar, bigint, char, or date, except for 2, which are CLOB
              (around 3000 characters/clob).
              >
              It is linked to 3 tablespaces, one for LOBs (32k pagesize), one for
              indexes (4k pagesize), one for normal data (4k pagesize).  All 3
              tablespaces have 8 containers and live on the same filesystem which is
              mounted on a VG that is tied to a SAN with 30+ disk (probably around
              100 disk, but I dont know exactly as I am not the SAN adm).
              >
              Is that enough info to help?
              >
              Also a new discovery!  After loading 15mil records to this table, I
              did a few table scans and got the disk usage in topas to report up to
              80% busy, so it seems that the load really is not using the full
              capacity of the disk (as the load is using about 15% of the disk).
              Also, the tablescan uses all 8 CPUs uniformially, where the load is
              only using 1 or 2 CPUs.
              >
              Get the DB2 write i/o speeds for transaction log data and application
              data from the database snapshot and work out the number of writes per
              millisecond.
              >
              E.G.
              >
              Log write time (sec.ns)         = 1730.000000004
              Number write log IOs                 = 1035798
              >
              (1730.000000004 * 1000) / 1035798       = 1.67 milliseconds perwrite.
              >
              Direct writes                             = 40354784
              Direct write elapsed time (ms)    = 959854
              >
              959854 / 40354784                               = 0.024 milliseconds per write.
              >
              Ask the storage admins for the i/o stats from the san and compare.
              >
              Where are the DB2 transaction logs located and how big are they?
              >
              If the SAN is EMC raid 5 and the write times are slow set the
              following registry variables at the instance level.
              >
              DB2_PARALLEL_IO *
              >
              Set the following instance parameters.
              >
              Enable intra-partition parallelism      INTRA_PARALLEL  ON
              Maximum query degree of parallelism     MAX_QUERYDEGREE ANY
              >
              Set the following database parameters.
              >
              Default query optimization class        DFT_QUERYOPT    5
              Degree of parallelism   DFT_DEGREE      ANY
              >
              Switch on concurrent i/o at tablespace level for all tablespaces in
              the database.
              >
              db2 ALTER TABLESPACE USERSPACE1 NO FILE SYSTEM CACHING
              >
              And if the load is still slow get the details for the san config.
              >
              E.G.
              >
              SAN is DMX-3.
              RAID is RAID 5(3+1).
              Data Block size is 256KB
              Parity Block size is 256
              Logical stripe(block) size is 768KB(256*3)
              >
              Recreate the tablspaces as DMS using a page size larger than 4k and
              make the extent size the same as the san stripe size.
              >
              Something like this.
              >
              create regular tablespace xxxx
              PAGESIZE 16K
              MANAGED BY DATABASE
              USING (FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_01' 2 G,
                     FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_02' 2 G,
                     FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_03' 2 G,
                     FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_04' 2 G)
              BUFFERPOOL   yyyy
              EXTENTSIZE   768
              PREFETCHSIZE  192
              OVERHEAD       8.6
              TRANSFERRATE   0.2
              NO FILE SYSTEM CACHING;- Hide quoted text -
              >
              - Show quoted text -
              These are all really good suggestions, but most we are already
              applying.

              We are using DMS tablespaces, seperating LOB data from index data from
              normal data.

              We use 8 contianers to "trick" the database into thinking there are 8
              Disks (I picked the number since we have 8 CPUs, so each CPU can
              concentrate on sending IO requests...alth ough I think we could have
              just as easily gone with 16 or 24 containers.) This trick forces
              parallel IO for normal inserts if you read up on the DB2
              documentation. The extent size, of course, is 8 times the prefetch
              size.

              I did research last night and found that when you load a table with
              LOB data, DB2 forces parallelism to 1 cpu, and parallel_IO to 4
              disks. This would match up with what I see on the load where only 4-6
              disks are working and only 1 CPU is working. As I said earlier,
              inserts use all 8 CPUs and 20 + disks @ 80% busy. Basically, the
              disks are beating the CPU in regards to throughput. Can anyone
              confirm this about LOB data loading into a table? And if this is the
              case, this would leave me to believe that an IMPORT is actually faster
              in my situation since it can take advantage of parallelism of all 8
              CPUs???

              Comment

              • rdudejr

                #8
                Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

                >
                Where are the DB2 transaction logs located and how big are they?- Hide quoted text -
                >
                - Show quoted text -
                Also these are non-logged loads, that is not a factor. As I said
                earlier, inserts are fine, it is the load that is giving me the issue
                of not using the available resources.

                Comment

                • Mark A

                  #9
                  Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

                  db2 ALTER TABLESPACE USERSPACE1 NO FILE SYSTEM CACHING

                  I assume this is not for the tablespace with LOBs?

                  LOB's do not use DB2 bufferpools and therefore file system caching should be
                  on for any tablespaces that contain LOBs.


                  Comment

                  • Patrick Finnegan

                    #10
                    Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

                    On Nov 11, 2:16 pm, rdudejr <rdud...@gmail. comwrote:
                    On Nov 11, 4:48 am, Patrick Finnegan <finnegan.patr. ..@gmail.com>
                    wrote:
                    >
                    >
                    >
                    On Nov 11, 8:15 am, Patrick Finnegan <finnegan.patr. ..@gmail.com>
                    wrote:
                    >
                    On Nov 11, 12:07 am, rdudejr <rdud...@gmail. comwrote:
                    >
                    On Nov 10, 6:16 pm, Ian <ianb...@mobile audio.comwrote:
                    >
                    rdud...@gmail.c om wrote:
                    Hi all,
                    >
                    I hardly ever make a post unless I am having a very purplexing issue,
                    so this one should be good...
                    >
                    I am trying to do a load against a database on an AIX server into a
                    DB2 v9.1 database, using SAN for storage.  The table has a few CLOBs
                    (smallish clobs but we are storing XML data in non-native format).
                    Here is the load command I am using:
                    >
                    db2 "load from loadset1 of del modified by chardel| coldel& insert
                    into testschema.test table nonrecoverable data buffer 240000
                    disk_parallelis m 32"
                    >
                    Now I am loading about 440 rows/second, which to me is abysmally
                    slow.  The tablespaces I am loading into have 8 containers and I
                    believe there are at least 30 disks on the SAN that the data
                    eventually lives on.  So needless to say there should be all the I/O
                    power available to load this data.
                    >
                    Can you post any more information, such as table DDL, tablespace
                    definition, maybe a few sample rows, etc?
                    >
                    Have you tried the load letting DB2 choose its own defaults for
                    data buffer / disk_parallelis m settings?- Hide quoted text -
                    >
                    - Show quoted text -
                    >
                    I have tried to allow the database to choose its own load values.  I
                    experience simular performance.
                    >
                    I cant post exact DDL/sample rows for security reasons, but I will do
                    my best to describe:
                    >
                    The table itself is a parent table to other child tables ( but this
                    should not matter with a load).  It has about 25 columns, all of which
                    are varchar, bigint, char, or date, except for 2, which are CLOB
                    (around 3000 characters/clob).
                    >
                    It is linked to 3 tablespaces, one for LOBs (32k pagesize), one for
                    indexes (4k pagesize), one for normal data (4k pagesize).  All 3
                    tablespaces have 8 containers and live on the same filesystem whichis
                    mounted on a VG that is tied to a SAN with 30+ disk (probably around
                    100 disk, but I dont know exactly as I am not the SAN adm).
                    >
                    Is that enough info to help?
                    >
                    Also a new discovery!  After loading 15mil records to this table,I
                    did a few table scans and got the disk usage in topas to report up to
                    80% busy, so it seems that the load really is not using the full
                    capacity of the disk (as the load is using about 15% of the disk).
                    Also, the tablescan uses all 8 CPUs uniformially, where the load is
                    only using 1 or 2 CPUs.
                    >
                    Get the DB2 write i/o speeds for transaction log data and application
                    data from the database snapshot and work out the number of writes per
                    millisecond.
                    >
                    E.G.
                    >
                    Log write time (sec.ns)         = 1730.000000004
                    Number write log IOs                 = 1035798
                    >
                    (1730.000000004 * 1000) / 1035798       = 1.67 milliseconds per write.
                    >
                    Direct writes                            = 40354784
                    Direct write elapsed time (ms)    = 959854
                    >
                    959854 / 40354784                              = 0.024 milliseconds per write.
                    >
                    Ask the storage admins for the i/o stats from the san and compare.
                    >
                    Where are the DB2 transaction logs located and how big are they?
                    >
                    If the SAN is EMC raid 5 and the write times are slow set the
                    following registry variables at the instance level.
                    >
                    DB2_PARALLEL_IO *
                    >
                    Set the following instance parameters.
                    >
                    Enable intra-partition parallelism      INTRA_PARALLEL  ON
                    Maximum query degree of parallelism     MAX_QUERYDEGREE ANY
                    >
                    Set the following database parameters.
                    >
                    Default query optimization class        DFT_QUERYOPT    5
                    Degree of parallelism   DFT_DEGREE      ANY
                    >
                    Switch on concurrent i/o at tablespace level for all tablespaces in
                    the database.
                    >
                    db2 ALTER TABLESPACE USERSPACE1 NO FILE SYSTEM CACHING
                    >
                    And if the load is still slow get the details for the san config.
                    >
                    E.G.
                    >
                    SAN is DMX-3.
                    RAID is RAID 5(3+1).
                    Data Block size is 256KB
                    Parity Block size is 256
                    Logical stripe(block) size is 768KB(256*3)
                    >
                    Recreate the tablspaces as DMS using a page size larger than 4k and
                    make the extent size the same as the san stripe size.
                    >
                    Something like this.
                    >
                    create regular tablespace xxxx
                    PAGESIZE 16K
                    MANAGED BY DATABASE
                    USING (FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_01' 2 G,
                           FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_02' 2 G,
                           FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_03' 2 G,
                           FILE '/home/data/xxxx/DMSCONTAINERS/CONT_04' 2 G)
                    BUFFERPOOL   yyyy
                    EXTENTSIZE   768
                    PREFETCHSIZE  192
                    OVERHEAD       8.6
                    TRANSFERRATE   0.2
                    NO FILE SYSTEM CACHING;- Hide quoted text -
                    >
                    - Show quoted text -
                    >
                    These are all really good suggestions, but most we are already
                    applying.
                    >
                    We are using DMS tablespaces, seperating LOB data from index data from
                    normal data.
                    >
                    We use 8 contianers to "trick" the database into thinking there are 8
                    Disks (I picked the number since we have 8 CPUs, so each CPU can
                    concentrate on sending IO requests...alth ough I think we could have
                    just as easily gone with 16 or 24 containers.)   This trick forces
                    parallel IO for normal inserts if you read up on the DB2
                    documentation.  The extent size, of course, is 8 times the prefetch
                    size.
                    >
                    I did research last night and found that when you load a table with
                    LOB data, DB2 forces parallelism to 1 cpu, and parallel_IO to 4
                    disks.  This would match up with what I see on the load where only 4-6
                    disks are working and only 1 CPU is working.  As I said earlier,
                    inserts use all 8 CPUs and 20 + disks @ 80% busy.  Basically, the
                    disks are beating the CPU in regards to throughput.  Can anyone
                    confirm this about LOB data loading into a table?  And if this is the
                    case, this would leave me to believe that an IMPORT is actually faster
                    in my situation since it can take advantage of parallelism of all 8
                    CPUs???
                    If the disk write speeds from the database snapshot are less than .5
                    milliseconds per write and the load with lobs is single threaded then
                    an import may be faster.

                    Do you have a link for the research indicating single threading with
                    lobs?

                    If you still want to use load and the instance runs on an lpar then
                    ask the Aix admin for at least one dedicated physical cpu on the
                    lpar. Chances are you are running with virtual cpu which may amount
                    to less than one physical cpu i.e. DB2 may run faster on one physical
                    cpu than multiple virtual cpus and the load if single threaded will
                    probably run faster on that physical cpu.



                    Comment

                    • rdudejr

                      #11
                      Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

                      We turn off filesystem caching on all our tablespaces, regardless of
                      if they have LOBs or not (as we do not want giant lobs in memory).

                      Here is the link about parallelism not supported with LOBs:



                      read halfway down under "CPU_PARALLELIS M"

                      We do not use LPARs here, the only shared resource is Disk on the
                      SAN. I tried the import and it was even slower. I did strip out the
                      LOBs and create the table SANs lob loaded data SANs lob, and I was
                      able to load 3 million records in less than a minute...more of the
                      performance I was expecting.

                      So I guess all of this data leads me to this question...what is the
                      best way to load a LOB into a table, seeing as DB2's LOAD utility does
                      an abysmal job of dealing with LOBs?????

                      Comment

                      • rdudejr

                        #12
                        Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

                        Noone has any more good ideas on this?

                        And yes I know this is a shameless bump but I am getting pretty
                        desperate/frustrated with DB2's behaviour at this point in regards to
                        LOBs.

                        On Nov 12, 2:50 pm, rdudejr <rdud...@gmail. comwrote:
                        We turn off filesystem caching on all our tablespaces, regardless of
                        if they have LOBs or not (as we do not want giant lobs in memory).
                        >
                        Here is the link about parallelism not supported with LOBs:
                        >
                        http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infoce...x.jsp?topic=/c....
                        >
                        read halfway down under "CPU_PARALLELIS M"
                        >
                        We do not use LPARs here, the only shared resource is Disk on the
                        SAN.  I tried the import and it was even slower.  I did strip out the
                        LOBs and create the table SANs lob loaded data SANs lob, and I was
                        able to load 3 million records in less than a minute...more of the
                        performance I was expecting.
                        >
                        So I guess all of this data leads me to this question...what is the
                        best way to load a LOB into a table, seeing as DB2's LOAD utility does
                        an abysmal job of dealing with LOBs?????

                        Comment

                        • rdudejr

                          #13
                          Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

                          Noone has any more good ideas on this?

                          And yes I know this is a shameless bump but I am getting pretty
                          desperate/frustrated with DB2's behaviour at this point in regards to
                          LOBs.

                          Comment

                          • Ian

                            #14
                            Re: Load performance on AIX w/ SAN

                            rdudejr wrote:
                            Noone has any more good ideas on this?
                            >
                            And yes I know this is a shameless bump but I am getting pretty
                            desperate/frustrated with DB2's behaviour at this point in regards to
                            LOBs.
                            You're not going to get much help if you can't give any useful
                            information. No DDL, no sample data, etc.

                            What process do you see consuming the most CPU when you're running the
                            load? Is it db2lfrm (i.e. the process that formats the actual data
                            pages)? Or is it something else?

                            Do you get warnings or errors from your load process (i.e. does DB2
                            complain about your data?)

                            Are your lobs inline in the data file, or are they external (i.e. lob
                            locators in the actual import file)?


                            Comment

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